Well, let’s just say that when the folks were away, the music played
- Mike Dewey: Life Lines
- February 19, 2018
- 1591
You always remember your first time. The details remain as fresh and immediate and wonderful as if it had just taken place. For me it happened during the winter of my senior year in high school. I was about to turn 18 and believed I already knew a thing or two about one of life’s greatest pleasures.
Of course I’m referring to rock music. What? You thought I was talking about something else? Hmm.
Anyway, I’d been in a close relationship with rock ‘n’ roll since Feb. 9, 1964, the Sunday evening of The Big Bang when the Beatles appeared on “The Ed Sullivan Show.”
Nothing had adequately prepared me for what I — and millions of others — experienced that night. How could it? The lads from Liverpool changed everything.
Suddenly the world seemed brighter, more vibrant, and even though I watched their performance on a black-and-white TV set the size of a laundry basket, I knew something essential had shifted.
Flash forward eight years, closing in on graduation and still lollygagging when it came to sending out applications for college, I occupied myself with writing for the school paper, shoveling snow when the neighbors needed me and generally studying when I had to but listening to music all the time.
By then, sensing my not-so-subtle hints at the drawbacks of our family’s little white plastic record player, Dad broke down and purchased a full-fledged console stereo.
It was a beautiful thing, a true marvel of engineering, a finely crafted and designed piece of polished wooden furniture that soon occupied a place of honor in our family room.
Once you opened its hinged top, you saw not only an AM/FM radio band, all lighted in cool blue and green, but a turntable and a cassette deck. The speakers, left and right, were housed inside.
I loved it from the moment it arrived just before Christmas and thanked my father earnestly and often for the world of sound it opened. Not that it came without rules. This was an expensive item, not a toy, and I was expected to set an example for its proper usage.
Well, let’s just say that when the folks were away, music played. Loud.
Gradually though, I became aware of another way to listen to albums, and that, once again, changed everything.
I had a friend who was the son of a doctor. He lived in a big house in the nicest part of town.
We had been through grade school together and, though not tight, had maintained a Catholic survivor’s kinship, something that had stood the test of time even as we endured the vast differences between parochial and public education.
My friend had a car — again, his family was well off — and one day, instead of dropping me off after school, he drove to his home.
“There’s something I want to show you,” he said.
It was the first time I’d been inside his house, and I was duly impressed with its tasteful opulence, coordinated rooms with artwork and antiques, a modern kitchen that my mother would have spent an hour searching for an electric skillet, and a basement/game room that included a pool table and a fireplace.
After having given me the nickel tour, my friend led me upstairs and down a sconce-lighted hallway. He stopped, opened a heavy oak door and said, “Take a look at this.”
It was clearly his father’s den, but in addition to a polished desk the size of a casket and all the medical texts housed in floor-to-ceiling shelves, I noticed a glow coming from a darkened corner.
“You saw it right away,” my friend said. “I figured you would.”
It was a component stereo system, featuring a dazzling array of handsome machines, all top-of-the-line equipment with brand names like Marantz, Thorens, Bang & Olufsen and JBL.
“Pretty cool, isn’t it?” he asked, rather rhetorically.
I nodded, at a loss for words.
Then he left me there and ran upstairs, returning in a minute or so with an album in his hand.
“I got this a week ago but haven’t had a chance to listen to it yet,” he said, “at least not on Dad’s system.”
“You’re not allowed to use it?” I asked, again rather rhetorically.
“No one’s here,” he said, pulling a record carefully from its sleeve. “I say we go for it.”
I tore my eyes from the jacket cover. It was “Rock of Ages” by The Band, a live double-album that had been all over FM radio that winter. I said, “Hey, it’s your house too.”
My friend lifted the tonearm from its perch and lowered it gently to the vinyl’s surface.
Immediately the air in his father’s study changed and felt charged with a warmth and an electric vibration that hadn’t been there before. It was as if the grooves in the record, silently spinning, were inviting me in to a private performance, and I walked right in.
The first track on side one is, as you probably know, “Don’t Do It,” in which The Band covers a Marvin Gaye tune but transforms it into something else, something unique.
That afternoon I learned what “separation” and “channels” were, how the horn section was mixed with the bass and drums on the left, even as the guitars and keyboards soared from the right and the vocals blended in the invisible center of that room.
It was loud and clear and strong, as magnificent a two and a half minutes as I had experienced in a long time.
As soon as the song ended and the audience’s applause erupted, my friend removed the record from the turntable, placed it in its wrapper and methodically switched off all the components.
“Better turn down the volume knob,” I said. “Your father … ”
“Good call,” he said. “Thanks.”
“No,” I said, my ears still ringing, newly awakened. “Thank you.”
Mike Dewey can be emailed at CarolinamikeD@aol.com or snail-mailed at 6211 Cardinal Drive, New Bern, NC 28560. He invites you to join the fun on his Facebook page.